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Canberra Weather Radar Offline

It looks like the Bureau of Meteorology’s Canberra weather radar [1] is offline, with the cryptic message:

IDR99940 CANBERRA RADAR IS U/S UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ANY INCONVENIENCE IS REGRETTED. 17/1135Z

The good news is that it is only the web interface for it which is offline, the radar itself is working perfectly, and feeding images to the Weatherzone website. The radar image on the Canberra weather screen (the weather reports on the right of screen take you there) is quite abysmal, but their dedicated radar page [2] is quite good…just turn on borders and it all makes sense. One small pointer though, their idea of “Canberra” is the airport, not the city. If you turn on roads, the city is located roughly at the intersection of the purple road leading west from the airport, and the thick purple road heading north/south.

Update 3:58pm: Upon further investigation, it looks like the Weatherzone site is just using the last data it had available, and that is from 8:20pm last night. Looks like the Sydney radar is about the best we have available, and its coverage of this area isn’t all that good. It can pick up rain in Canberra, but it can’t see it coming. End Update

Update 4:09pm: The Wagga Wagga radar [3] has a pretty good view, but the New South Wales composite radar [4] is arguably the best view. The combination of the Sydney, Wagga Wagga and any other radar that just happens to pick up Canberra on the outskirts of its view seems to handle the job that the Canberra radar did. End Update

Samuel